Nazis, Marxists, and the History of Ideas

September 7, 2024 by Stephen Soukup

While Hitler and Mussolini both expressed their opposition to and hatred of “Marxists,” they nevertheless embraced a leftism that was only marginally different from that embraced by Lenin and Stalin.

In light of recent events and discussions attempting to rehabilitate the historical reputation of Germany’s Nazis, it might be worthwhile to re-examine the foundations of the ideology that underpinned National Socialism and its close cousin fascism. Those who embrace the revisionism that excuses the Nazis’ crimes appear to believe that by doing so, they are defending themselves and their ideological brethren from unfair and ahistorical attacks by the broader left. They think—or at least seem to think—that because fascism is considered a “right-wing” ideology that was specifically pitted against both Communism and Western liberalism, it can hardly be as awful as has been assumed and that its association with unvarnished evil is mere propaganda.

They are wrong. Indeed, the very foundations of their sentiments are mistaken and result from the radical mischaracterization of history and the evolution of ideas in the two centuries after the Enlightenment.

The simple truth of the matter is that the standard depiction of National Socialism and fascism as right-wing ideologies is inarguably false. While Hitler and Mussolini both expressed their opposition to and hatred of “Marxists,” they nevertheless embraced a leftism that was only marginally different from that embraced by Lenin and Stalin. Their hatred was a practical matter, a question of power rather than ideas. Both economically and socially, the Nazis and their Italian cousins were inheritors of the leftist traditions.

Almost from the moment he put pen to paper, Karl Marx’s enemies, as well as his friends, set about explaining why his theories about and solutions to the conflict between capital and labor had no serious application in the real world. Marx was a fantasist, and everyone—save perhaps his occasional partner in crime, Friedrich Engles—knew it.

Among the most important—though least remembered—of Marx’s one-time friends to help try to restructure his ideas to fit reality was a young German labor activist named Ferdinand Lassalle. Unlike his friend and intellectual guide, Lassalle toughed it out and stayed in Germany after the 1848 Revolution. As a result, he had a far greater impact on the formation of practical German socialism than Marx ever did. Although the specifics of Lassalle’s adaptations to socialism frustrated Marx and especially Engels, by staying in Germany and fighting for radical leftism in praxis rather than merely in theory, Lassalle won other friends and admirers, including the most important and powerful Prussian of the 19^th century, Otto von Bismarck.

Lassalle’s revisions to Marxism permitted, in theory at least, the maintenance of economic benefits created by the private control of capital, blended with the social change and “progress” demanded by the workers’ movements. Unsurprisingly, the promised results of these revisions appealed tremendously to the politically astute Bismarck.

So, while Lassalle is considered the godfather of German socialism, Bismarck—the conservative monarchist and rabid anti-socialist—is, ironically, the godfather of the German welfare state. He took Lassalle’s admonitions and advice to heart and, thereby, sought to preempt Marx’s “inevitable” revolution. Unlike Marx, who bleated on endlessly about the withering away of the state, Lassalle believed that effective socialism required a powerful state. Indeed, his vision postulated an alliance between the workers and the state, a confederation designed to bypass and undermine the “liberalism” of the bourgeoisie. He found an ally in this effort in Bismarck, who admired Lassalle’s intelligence and soberness and shared his revulsion at the liberal-capitalist middle class. Bismarck’s embrace of universal suffrage as well as his implementation of the continent’s first widespread social welfare measures were dictated in large part by his understanding of and appreciation for Lassalle’s ideas. Between them, Lassalle and Bismarck created the first operational version of the “middle ground” between Marxism and capitalism, the first form of “managed capitalism,” or what would, in time, come to be called “the Third Way.”

Though the first, Lassalle was far from the only socialist theorist to attempt to stake out the middle ground of state-managed capitalism. His fellow German socialist (and eventual Marxist revisionist) Edward Bernstein, the French journalist (and defamer of Jews) Charles Maurras, and the French engineer-turned-syndicalist Georges Sorel all offered thoughts, theories, and hypothetical modifications to Marxism that advocated state intervention and management of industry and capital to the detriment of the bourgeoisie and the benefit of the workers.

Likewise, Bismarck had successors as well. National Socialism and fascism sought to meld what its leaders perceived to be the most effective aspects of the left with the most effective aspects of the right. Having fought in World War I, both Mussolini and Hitler understood intrinsically that Marx’s “international” proletariat was a myth and that the workers of the world had no desire to unite and throw off their chains. Indeed, they had no desire to be “of the world” at all. Instead, they wanted to be “of Germany,” “of France,” or “of Italy.” By blending extreme nationalism with corporatist/statist economics, the fascists presented a more immediately practical alternative to the failure of the Marxist Revolution to manifest itself than was presented by their more culturally obsessed countrymen: Antonio Gramsci and the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School.

Building upon the ideas of Maurras and especially Sorel, the fascists and National Socialists cobbled together a program merging extreme nationalism, corporatist economics, utopianism, atheism, and historicism. Like Lassalle and Bismarck before them, Hiter and Mussolini were animated by Hegel’s twin notions that “the state is the presence of God upon the Earth” and that history is moving toward some predetermined, utopian end.

Even beyond economics, the Nazis and fascists borrowed liberally from their left-wing brethren. Both British Fabianism and American Progressivism were obsessed with racial purity and purification through eugenics. The contemporary left professes a dedication to racial equity and harmony, but its history is far different. Indeed, Richard Ely and Woodrow Wilson, two of the godfathers of American Progressivism and intellectual giants of the left, helped set the stage—philosophically and practically—for Hitler’s atrocities.

As part of his program to harness the power of the state to perfect man’s existence, Ely embraced the “science” of eugenics. Ely became a pioneer in the eugenics movement with the publication in 1903 of his book Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society, in which he waxed optimistic about the positive effects that could be achieved by the ongoing efforts in the various states to limit the ability of “objectionable” people to breed.

And in eugenics, as in all ideological matters, where Ely went, Wilson followed. As the governor of New Jersey, Wilson signed one of the nation’s first and most draconian state eugenics laws, a law that was drafted by none other than Dr. Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen, who would later turn against his fellow Jewish prisoners and become a notorious killer-doctor in Hitler’s Buchenwald death camp. Among other things, Wilson’s law created a special three-man “Board of Examiners of Feebleminded, Epileptics, and Other Defectives” to monitor the “advisability” of procreation among certain demographic groups.

In short, the plans and schemes put in place by Hitler and his National Socialists were unprecedented in their scope and effectiveness but were hardly so in their ideological derivation. In the rush to “defend” Hitler and his ilk from the supposed intellectual onslaught by Marxism, the members of the Nazi-sympathetic right would do well to spend some time investigating and understanding the relationship between Marx, Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. As even Hitler’s propagandist Joseph Goebbels noted in his private diaries, “It would be better for us to end our existence under Bolshevism than to endure slavery under capitalism.”